About thirty years ago, when I was sixteen, I had just started driving. My car was pretty beat up because it was cheap enough for me to get, but it was drivable. One day I had just dropped someone off and was leaving the neighborhood.

The road was narrow—basically one lane in each direction with curves—so as a new driver I was trying to be careful.

I was driving around the speed limit, about twenty-five miles per hour. A police car came up behind me. I noticed it getting closer and closer. From my driver’s education class, I remembered that when police approach, you should get out of the way.

But there was a double yellow line and no shoulder to pull over. I didn’t know what to do. The only thing I could think of was to drive faster to get out of that narrow section of road. The faster I drove, the more suspicious it looked.

Soon several other police cars joined behind me. By the time I reached the next intersection, police cars were coming from other directions to block me in. I finally stopped.

I was nervous. I was only sixteen, in an unfamiliar part of town, and my English wasn’t very good. Officers approached with guns drawn and shouted commands.

I stepped out of the car, shaking, not even sure what I had done wrong. After checking my license and talking among themselves, they eventually let me go. One officer stayed behind and calmly explained what had happened. He said I shouldn’t have sped up. He had simply been driving behind me on his way somewhere else. But when I started speeding up, it made him think I was trying to run, so he called for backup.

Looking back, I realized that my own fear and uncertainty helped create the situation.

Years later, I’ve been stopped a couple of times again—minor things. Once, I made a turn into the wrong lane leaving a school intersection.

The officer stopped me, explained the mistake politely, smiled, and let me go without even asking for my license. Another time, one of my kids leaned out the car window at a red light to wave at a friend. A police officer saw it and stopped us, but only to remind us that kids shouldn’t stick their heads or arms out of the window.

He was friendly and simply wanted to make sure everyone was safe. I could have received tickets in both cases. But I didn’t. Not everyone is as bad as we sometimes assume. Sometimes the way we carry ourselves—calm, respectful, confident—changes the interaction. When we don’t act like we’re in trouble, we’re also less likely to invite trouble.

The first thing is just to recognize the environment that we live in today. We live in a world that’s fueled by easy access to information and social media.

The reality is that bad news sells much faster than good news. And oftentimes we see the worst of the worst just to generate attention. But there is no substitute for time and putting in time.

Back in Boston, there’s a very healthy Portuguese community. I have some friends from the Azores and they speak very little English. I speak very little Portuguese. But we sit and talk for hours when we get together because we’re both making the effort to get to know about each other’s families and cultures.

It’s a learning experience just to talk directly to a person about where they’re from and what they do. It’s a conversation without pretense. And it’s always interesting. We’ve been like the best of friends for twenty years now. We sit and we talk. The husband always ends the meeting with, “I make the best wine.

You must see my wine cellar.” He shows me his grapevine and brings out a little shot glass and says, “This is too much for you, Randy.

I don’t know if you can handle this.” Then his buddies come by and say, “No, I make the best wine. I use the white grapes.” Another one says, “I use the purple grapes. Your wine is okay.”

But it’s just that country lifestyle — when you sit back and take the time to get to know each other one-on-one, face-to-face, without technology, without filters, and just have an open dialogue.

This is part of the DOI250AA Community Dialogue, for more details, subscribe or visit DOI250AA.net

I believe that if something happens to someone in the Asian community and it makes the news, and it’s in my community and there’s a public meeting, I and other African Americans should show up.

It should not be a room of Asian Americans defending Asian Americans. It should be a room full of Americans defending what’s right and what’s wrong. Because then that person in that community says the African American community showed up and they supported me.

I think I’ll show up at some of their events. So now it’s not just an African American problem. It’s not an Asian American problem.

It’s a local community problem that we get involved in each other’s lives. We get to know each other one-on-one because there’s no substitute for having that relationship.

Because oftentimes people react to things that they read about, but they really don’t know anyone in that community personally. You really have to get to know the person because we’re talking about how do you create safety and integrity and trust.

And I advocate that’s almost impossible to truly create that without first creating the relationship because policy and procedure doesn’t create safety. The relationships do. The policy and procedure is just an extension, a formalization, but it’s the relationship where you can pick up the phone and call someone and say, hey, Doctor Zhang, how you doing?

Hey, Jack, what’s going on? Or as my father would say, what’s the real story? You hear it from the source. Now you can be a part of the solution. And I think that one of the keys to bringing America together is to get to know other people because then their problems become your problems.

It’s not a competitive thing. We’re fighting for our own agendas. Everyone has an agenda. But it doesn’t have to be a competitive thing because if we’re working together, it’s a matter of how do I help you to get what you want?

You know, when we’re home with our families and everyone has a busy life and we don’t get to see each other. The kids are doing school and soccer and football and ballet. But we knew on Sunday the family would come together and have dinner.

And that’s when you get to find out where everybody was at in their life, that one-on-one. And I think that is one of the keys because there is no substitute for that personal interaction. Because that’s when you hear what’s going on with another person from that person.

And you can get involved in a way or bring a different insight that helps that person. And you know, for most people, I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase: People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

I had loved the idea of having a some sort of a diaspora initiative because Chicago has the second largest Polish population then Warsaw. Chicago also has the largest population of Latinos, then Mexico City, I mean second largest. And the question boils down to, if you talk to all of them, how has we allowed everybody to flourish together?

And what does the flourishing mean? And how will all of this artificial? And I emphasize the word artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. And I do emphasize the word synthetic and, and, and how will this new age that is already upon us and has been going on since the beginning of the twentieth century going to be shaped?

Whether it will be shaped by purely technology, whether it will be shaped by the interrelationship between technology and human being? And are we a tool?

Are we using technology as a tool to basically make human obsolete? Or are we making technology to make human being better? And what is that relationship? And I and I think we need to undertake a a real evaluation by talking to various diasporas because you ask yourself who is an American?

And that is how I would like to help celebrate the DOI two fifty because I have this group that we created, which is a group of people that meet at the library. And they had been meeting for, you know, almost thirty years before I joined them. And they all were right or wrong, defining themselves as conservatives.

And and I’m saying to myself, what is this left, right, conservative, progressive and all of these bipolar issues? And how are we really going to face this idea of artificial general intelligence, which I was lucky to work with little bit with the people in the Silicon Valley at one point in time to understand what does the word singularity really mean?

And I think we should look at the ground ground up as well as top down to to be really the issues that we are dealing with. Otherwise, the social media and technology and what we call as PayPal Mafia in Los Angeles will eat us alive.

And it is an existential issue When we it was easy to differentiate between, you know, the Cold War was a way to really create the balance between the victors of the Second World War. But where are we going to go when we are fighting with the kind of forces that are being unleashed?

And we are not going to be fighting with the Frankenstein’s. We are going to be fighting with the with Frankenstein’s who are going to materialize as our neighbors. And that is what I I feel that we owe it to ourselves.

I think if to to take away our differences and start to define what does it mean to be an American and especially after two hundred and fifty years of our differences, can we evolve is start to evolve a human American civilization which is not facing the kind of issues that we all talked about of discrimination in reality rather than on paper and in the form of legal system only.

As I look at it, I say, do we have a open mind or do we have a close mind? And that is a fundamental difference between the idea of building bridges, which you mentioned, Jack, and that relates directly to saying what I always took.

And I always thank the black community for having put up with for almost two hundred years till Martin Luther gave us the I have a Dream speech.

And I tell you he paid for it with his life. And the question we are raising today in twenty twenty six is we are going beyond all of the industrial age itself as a human specie and moving towards and talking more and more about artificial intelligence and synthetic biology.

But what are the facts that we agree on? What are the basic assumptions that we agree on? Which I always fall back to what was said by Martin Luther King and how the whole Rainbow Coalition was manifested in Chicago.

And today we have no facts that we agree on about anything. And trust me, we haven’t seen anything yet because the age of intelligences and multiple intelligences is already creeping up in the way of artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence and all of these things.

So the question becomes is what does it mean to be an individual who can form a community? And the basic unit of that used to be family.

And we have over the last two hundred year, two hundred and fifty years, we have taken those things and what used to be facts within the community have gotten distorted. And the misinformation that is coming to us, whether we like it or not, the is, is being influenced by all the narratives, which I always remember the, the, the, the, the, the, what happened in the Second World War much more than I have studied the First World War.

And do we want to divide and continue the division or do we want to unite and continue to build as, as humans? Because the fake is here and, and, and the misinformation that we talked about earlier that Celine mentioned was very critical part of it.

So I, that’s my feeling that are we, we, we have to build the community from the inside out as local communities, but we also have to make them aware of what are all the influences from the outside that are impacting it.

And I have always thanked Martin Luther King and the whole civic civil rights movements for the opportunity to be in this country. And the very fact that I was impressed by the idea of earth and heaven as being two distinct things in some ways.

But we when President Kennedy said let’s go to the moon, that really inspired me sitting all of the distances away as a young kid. And that is why I ended up here as a immigrant.

But now I’m more concerned about what happens to my grandkids and their grandkids as we build an American civilization rather than diverse groups of people.

I live originally live and my daughter grew up only daughter in New Jersey. Northern New Jersey maybe a thirty minutes from George Washington Bridge. Exactly the town is Richwood New Jersey, a good town, great town and most Asian look for property in the suburb. They look for good school district. So we exactly in the same St. have at the time had the Montessori preschool and then junior high next to us and then grade school, grade school, same street. So I lived in the junior high and that day was a snow day. That’s back probably fifteen years, fifteen years ago, no more than that twenty twenty some years ago. So snow day kids would slide down something like with this lead because snow. So I’m excited and there’s no cell phone. I use digital camera to take some far picture of the backs because it’s so colorful. And a little group of parents confronted me. So I delete the picture. And that night they sent police to check me out. So of course, they are protective to their kids, not just physical form, but any possibility of being abused or some negative, yeah, stalking about. And that’s understandable. But I also at those moment or even now, but I don’t feel sad now, but feel sad about that moment. I speak English and they confronted me. I said I’m just a neighbor. You probably part in front of my property of one of you or some of you who on the on the street right to access to the the playground, because not all not all the kid is from the school, right. They are kids. They are not junior high people. I leave it like that, just friendly, not too confronting, although they confront me. So that’s, try to note is that what if I don’t speak English? What if I don’t know, I’m just a photographer, just immigrated speaking Chinese or other language, so excited to photograph a beautiful harmony picture of color and snow and people. Maybe I’m from Malaysia or Singapore, but Singapore speak English and just don’t speak the language and just an artist or just amateur photographer, so I don’t know what they’re talking. Probably they will take me to the police right away.

Her Chinese New Year in Wuhan just like four years ago or five years ago. That that that moment. And she haven’t visited home for maybe ten years. She’s in the Koran, not a Shella, so she gets stuck there. I have a first hand experience. At that time we already have WeChat. I do not use WeChat now because I have too many, so I only limit to WhatsApp and so on and so on. But we talk constant. I have a constant support for her and have report from her directly from Wuhan. We started just like Doctor Chen, your daughter start a group of on Zoom and and to just connect right, mostly maybe Chinese American, but local or English speaking born here. This is my second language. So here here my accent from Hong Kong. So so that connect people find the best right and faster than maybe even more powerful organization that now use Zoom and Google me and I realized two things. One thing is that zoom has been exist for a long time, but that is the launching pad, right, Just like a space shuttle straight up instead of climbing up like a propeller. But the second thing is even after that, although I’m on Zoom with you like my Chinese friends or other commute friends in New York or even all but the space to China and she was she was invited actually somehow she’s get some access to sister-in-law to talk to us afterward on the Zoom. She’s dead to Colorado. But I have that same as Doctor Chung’s daughter’s feeling Jens Jensi. What I’m not Jensi. I’m sixty eight of her settle loneliness that I’m not meeting you guys or say would certainly expect to meet you guys sometime there because it was in the pandemic. So this meeting, although we are all real, not AI or not already editing right edited after the fact, cannot this taking place cannot I would say really be our own form of interaction yeah this is very subtle right psychological impact that people realize or not so this is just something that we all have to explore and how to reach out yeah and and the interchange of experience. So I treasure this type of exploration and we can be all empower powerful because by the design of, you know, things happening, we connect and this small connection become a pathway of access to more people. And even they don’t speak a language and they have been in this country for many years other than in the business. They can say hello, they can make you good Chinese food and they can smile to you. But that is important and then also additional of the language skill. That’s just like Savain said. Or be here longing for, to to breakthrough for next level of communication and communities.